The Campaign continues

HI, Kay here
Im very surprised by how much attention this got for being just a prototype, so, i feel obligated to make a devlog to talk about its development and mechanics, about the stuff that got cut out, the stuff id like to add in the future, and, to thank you all for giving it way more attention than i expected.

The development

I made the game for the  Game Design Guild aniversary jam (which i actually won, tho, it was a small jam), so, i made it in a rush in 30 days (out of which i wasted 5 between finally playing RE4R and having a terrible PC crash that got my computer out of service for a few days), and im surprised i got this much done in time.
Unfortunatelly, i had no time to do testing (so, anything that is numbers related is likely going to need to be fixed), and a lot of stuff that i initially planned had to be let out due to a lack of time, i just had the minimum viable game for the jam purpouses..... and since the theme of the jam was sisyphean games, i somehow decided that that minimum was a full instruction manual with lore, and 4 faction booklets with faction lore.

The very first prototype of the board was made by hand and the mechanics where very different, movement was linear messy, rather than proper "diagonal" transfers, they where linear and more abstracted, there where also less orbits per disk and there werent intermediate nodes on the belt and jupiter orbits, and like 10 days into the jam i decided that it was not enough and had to rework the movement mechanics completely and they almost accidentally ended up being what they are now.

When i started making the game i had very little knowledge of orbital mechanics, i only knew the basics (from normally going to sleep with videos from Isaac Arthur as background noise), and when i started to actually read on how stuff worked, i lost my mind for a bit, but somehow i ended up on a decently good abstraction, but still not as good as it could be.

The main thing im not fully convinced of the quality is the lore, when i said i got it done in one sleepless night is not that much of an exageration, i wrotte it all in a single night on the last week of development, but did took 2 days more to make my ramblings readable, still, im not fully convinced of it and i might change it.
While most of the overall setting details, and specially, the factions lore, are what i wanted to do and i feel good about them, i think the "historical background" section is quite messy and needs reworking.

Whats coming in the future?

Obviously a proper cover, rather than a photobash with assets i dont own (for which, i again apologize and ill get it changed as soon as i can).

The current printable map is a bit small and not as practical as id want, i used the tiny 10 cents of peso coints we have here as tokens so it looked right, but, any proper token will be massive, so, i need a bigger map.
A bigger printable map would require considerably more pages, if i doubled the size, id need to increase it from 4 to 16 pages (something something inverse square law), and it would be hell to assemple if its just the same map but just square chunks of it that you gotta make sense of, but,  recently I think i found a way of making a printable map twice the size that would still be easy to assemble, making each of the 16 pages be either 1/12th of the jupiter + belt disks, or, 1/4th of the mars + earth disks.
Ill get in contact with my friend Dozsu who made the map to try and see how annoying to assemble it would be and if its good, ill make it avaliable soon, and likely, will include some printable tokens for you to cut out and paste on cardboard

As i mentioned, i didnt got much time to test, so, the number part of the mechanics (resource production and building costs) are kinda messy, so, ill do some testing and get them fixed sooner or later.

One thing that i really couldnt get well in the mechanics is doing multiple transfers up and down, so, for simplicity of the jam's version sake, i made so you could only change transfer direction on station nodes, which didnt feel right because with my limited understanding of delta v, if you have fuel to do, for example, one single transfer down, then stay in that new orbit and move "horizontally", and later on do another transfer down, that would require 4 burns that wouldnt be that different  fuel wise from going down and inmediately back up, but just letting you transfer up and down whenever you wanted would trivialize a lot of the mechanics, as it would have been way too easy to evade missiles and would have trivialized the distances in the belt and jupiter orbits.

But, now with more calm (and no dreadfull deadline looming upon me), i think i fould a decent solution, letting you change transfer direction but not inmediately after you did a transfer, changing from transfer movement to in-orbit movement is one correction, and you could only do one correction per turn, so, you could go do a transfer in one direction, lets say down, then on your next turn do 1 correction to change to in-obrit ("horizontal") movement, and on a 3rd turn you could again do another correction for a transfer, which could be either up or down, this way you could have more control over movement while not trivializing distances in the larger orbits.

As example of the fix, the RED line shows an incorrect move, if you could do that, moving from a lagrange (4 or 5) on a jupiter or belt orbit to the capital of that orbit would be completely trivialized.
GREEN shows the new way of transfers, so, you could transfer in one direction (in the example DOWN), go for at least a node in-orbit (in the example 3 because jovian disk), and then be able to transfer in the oposite direction of the initial transfer (in the example UP).
This would not trivialize missiles and mid distance travel, but, could help you reduce travel time in larger trips with proper planning  (in the example, instead of the PURPLE path to go from SJL4 to SJL5, which would be 12 rounds, you could use the GREEN one and reduce it to 8).
Id still need to test it before implementing it, but looks promising.
And, the limitation on changing orbit direction only on station nodes will stay as it is.

And, about the stuff that got cut, im still analizing them and seeing how to fit them in without making the game excesively complicated, i have some ideas for how to implement mobile asteroid miners and laser propulsion mechanics, and i have a few new ideas, like, for example, i found a way to add in some mechanics around the Hildas asteroids; ill see how well they fit and ill try to bring some of this stuff into the game.

On the complete opposite, some talks with my friends gave me ideas for how to make an even more hellish and terrible version of the game, with extra sub-boards (one for the jovian system and one for the outer planets including the kuiper belt) and up to 8 players, which could go full crusader kings with like, the jovian faction having 3 players sharing resources and having to either cooperate or compete, the belt having a central shogun and a joint of its daimyos as 2 separate players, and the arcadians having a foreign legion that turned into a splinter group, and it could all be extremely painfull and terrible but also funny and i really shoudlnt do it but i could but it would hurt me a lot so i likely wont do it.

Thanks and shoutouts

The Campaign for the Solar System got more attention than i expected for something i did in one month solo and im very thankfull.
It might not be a massive game but just the fact that people liked it enough to comment in one of my solo games makes me very happy.

Also, a few funny things happened since release, i got asked for the Disks as PNGs for using it in VTT, so, i went to DM dozsu to ask him for the assets, and before i could type the message he sent me the ZIP of the Disks, which i found it funny.
And yesterday i saw someone on twitter started doing what appears to be a digital version of my game and im like amazed,  but the tweet is no longer around.

And as a last thing, my friend Selkie, who i worked with on Rosethorn keep, has a Kickstarter out for Celestial Bodies and id be very thankfull if you checked it out.